ugg..sorry to hear ATR about the wrong TA. Hard to beleive your provider would be so clueless.

'Not so hard, really.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sasmps

Still asking the forum for any history on getting only 1 TA from their provider, and or if they found a way to get there own.

The policy is up to each individual provider. Currently, any number of TAs are free on Time Warner Cable systems. Whether there is a limit, I don't know, but I have three, all provided for no extra cost. They could decide to start charging for them tomorrow.

Wish people would put their location in their profiles! (So it shows on every post)

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This past week I got a letter in the mail stating that cox will be rolling out SDV on November 7th in in my area. And that I can call to request a tuning adapter to be mailed to me or for pick up at a cox retail location.

So I call, and get an automatic phone system asking me how may I help you. so I ask: "I would like to request a turning adapter" and it responds with "It sounds like the clock on your cable box is incorrect, is that correct?"

I hit zero a bunch of times and finally I get a person. Who then transfers me to tech support, who then transfers me to sales, who then transfers me back to tech, then I got transferred back to sales. who then transferred me back to tech. So finally I get a guy who knows about tuning adapters, but he tells me I have to talk to sales, they tech can't mail them out or have them available for pick up, so he finally gets me someone.

Talking to this person, I get placed on hold for a couple minutes, then he comes back with we have a promotion, if I swap out my cable cards for a cable box they will only charge me $1.99 a month for the cable box. I tell him no chance, I want to keep my tivo. I get placed on hold for 5 minutes, then he comes back with they will have a truck roll between 10:30 and 12:30 tomorrow with a $50 truck roll fee and wanted to know if I was going to be available / home.

I argued that the letter states that I can have one mailed to me or can pick one up. He had me hold again while he looked into how to do self installs. It took them 15 minutes to figure out how and get one UPS'ed to me.

I was on the phone for 55 minutes and 35 seconds to get a turning adapter...

Does tivo have any email address to report how difficult it is to get one of these from the cable companies?

Your cable company is supposed to ensure you have access to all linear channels. Cable operators must ensure that subscribers can use their retail device to access all of the linear channels that comprise the cable package to which you subscribe.

Offering you a switch to their cable box sounds like a violation to me. They are supposed to know about this and getting an SDV adapter should be no more difficult than getting their own cable box.

.........I was on the phone for 55 minutes and 35 seconds to get a turning adapter...

You think maybe customers who use tuning adapters (mostly TiVo users) aren't really important to them? They comprise less than 1% of digital cable users. And you came close to paying $50 for something that should be free.

I and many others do this. We can always hope it will make a difference, although I'm pretty doubtful about it. CableCARD and Tuning Adapters have already been recognized as failures by the FCC and they're trying to foster new approaches.

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I recently discovered (Cox never told me) that the reason I'm not receiving all the channels I paid for is that I require an SDV. They just provided me with two Motorola MTR700 units to install for the two cable cards in my TiVo.

My question is - do I really need two? If this box is serving channel info via USB, will it accept requests from both cards (in a single TiVo box)? I'd really like to avoid using a coax splitter to feed these two SDV boxes if I can avoid it - any ideas? Thanks!

Short story: You only need ONE TUNING ADAPTOR.
I finally called COX San Diego because I was not getting some HBO / STARZ / ENCORE channels. They sent a tech to my house to assess the situation. Luckily, I got a good one and he spent more than his allotted time trying to figure out what the problem was. His first guess was the cable card were not working correctly and he was trying to get a couple of them from a co-worker but he was too far away. He said he would drive and get them and come back and install them (it was 5:00 pm) or he said he would come back in the morning (first call). I told him it was not worth it to come back that night and it was fine to come back the next day.

Well, when he came back the next day he told me he was talking to a couple of co-workers and they determined that the channels I was missing were on SDV as of several months ago. I knew I was not getting these channels that long ago but I chose not to worry about it. The bummer here was the phone representative could not tell me that the channels I were not getting were on SDV.

When he showed up he had the tuning adaptor and hooked it up. It did not work at first and he called a co-worker who told him he needed two tuning adaptors. I gently told him I did not think that was the case because I was on Tivo's WEB site checking out how to hook up a tuning adaptor to a Series-3 Tivo. He called somebody else and they said he would need TWO TUNING ADAPTORS. Again, I gently told him I did not think that was the case and suggested we re-boot the tuning adaptor.

After the final reboot of the Tuning Adaptor, the Tivo saw the Tuning Adaptor and after a few menu selections I was up and running.

I was lucky, the tech they sent for my service call was open to my suggestions and listened to me; if not I think I still would be missing those channels.

Oh, and I am not paying anything for two cable cards or the tuning adaptor.

I am using a TIVO on one tv and a standard Scientific Atlanta (non-dvr HD box) on my other tv. My TIVO is constantly getting the message the "this channel not currently available..." especially if I stay on a channel for any length of time. My cable issued box NEVER gets this message or times out. I also never had this happen on my Scientific Atlanta DVR when I had one. Can someone explain with the TIVO handles SDV differently than the cable issued boxes? I posed this question in the Charter Community forum and they feel that it must be a tivo related issue.

Another interesting note is that the tivo will have a difficult time re-tuning the channel and say its unavailable but I can go in the other room and the Scientific Atlanta (4240HDC) will tune it instantly. The SA box never times out or has trouble tuning in a channel.

It may be that your cable company is being preferential to their own cable boxes. SDV is supposed to drop a channel if no one is using it and the bandwidth is needed by something else. Before doing that, it's supposed to send a message to the box to have it pop up a dialog "Are you still watching? Yes or No"; if you don't answer within a certain time limit it can decrease the count of people watching by one. It's not so strange that TiVo is letting the channel go, but that your standard cable boxes aren't.

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It may be that your cable company is being preferential to their own cable boxes. SDV is supposed to drop a channel if no one is using it and the bandwidth is needed by something else. Before doing that, it's supposed to send a message to the box to have it pop up a dialog "Are you still watching? Yes or No"; if you don't answer within a certain time limit it can decrease the count of people watching by one. It's not so strange that TiVo is letting the channel go, but that your standard cable boxes aren't.

That is what I thought and posed to Charter but they insist that there should be no difference between the way the TIVO handles the SDV channel and the cable box. I am wondering if there is just an unintentional technical difference or glitch with the way the TIVO handles it that caused the problem. Unfortunately it is very inconvenient to have the channel disappear on a 2 year old who doesn't know how to fix it. Charter tech said I should pose this question to TIVO. Is anyone else experiencing the same issue where their cable box handles the SDV timeouts differently then their TIVO?

That is what I thought and posed to Charter but they insist that there should be no difference between the way the TIVO handles the SDV channel and the cable box. I am wondering if there is just an unintentional technical difference or glitch with the way the TIVO handles it that caused the problem. Unfortunately it is very inconvenient to have the channel disappear on a 2 year old who doesn't know how to fix it. Charter tech said I should pose this question to TIVO. Is anyone else experiencing the same issue where their cable box handles the SDV timeouts differently then their TIVO?

Well, there's unintentional and then there's unintentional, and we are talking about a cable company who makes more when you rent their equipment than if you use a TiVo.

Unfortunately it is very inconvenient to have the channel disappear on a 2 year old who doesn't know how to fix it. Charter tech said I should pose this question to TIVO. Is anyone else experiencing the same issue where their cable box handles the SDV timeouts differently then their TIVO?

You should just set the TiVo to record during the 2 year olds watching time, that should solve the problem.

Every provider and market most likely handles the prompts slightly differently, I even notice a difference in the frequency of the prompt between different SDV channels.

My provider seems to handle them fairly well because I do not see them very often, and Cox AZ does provide a list of SDV channels so I know which ones they are. Occasionally my Cable boxes also prompt.

On Cox San Diego South, if I tune Tennis Channel HD and switch to my PC or some video device or game console for an hour or two, when I come back it's most likely released the channel. Pressing SELECT tunes it again.

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In Southwest Ohio Time Warner Cable had all kinds of problems with SDV and TIVO. It took many months for TW to learn the proper hits to send and how often so the tuning adapter works properly. Seems like each franchise does not help the others once they figure things out.

Turns out there are many different types of hits to send. And at least one needs to be sent on a regular basis like once a month or turning adapter loses authorization and quits working.

If issues are with the same channel/frequency I had a problem with interference with an over the air TV station 100 miles away. It was a very weak signal and aparently the digital signal on the coax is also weak. Replacing coax and the very cheap one that came with the tuning adapter solved the problem.

I've had an interesting problem turn up. Cox CATV Fairfax, VA - 2 Cable cards in a TIVOHD, with a CISCO SD adapter for those issues. Over the last maybe 6 months, I would find the TIVOHD occasionally doing a scheduled recording, but see the channel was black (blank?), and the result being a missing recording for that event. I found if I cycled power for the CISCO adapter, it would come back on, the TIVO would give me the "found Adapter" message and sync up, then maybe 5 mins later I'd get the "Found Adapter" message again and this time the pays (HD channels and all of that) would sync up. I figured the 2nd "hit" was when the CISCO box got authorized by the cable company.

Lately, its been happening more frequently. We created a Season pass for the CBS Evening news (6:30PM) so we can watch that every evening, even when we are not home at 6:30. The last couple weeks it was intermittent. last 2 nights I was home and happened to be watching ... the 6PM local news would be playing just fine and when the CBS Evening news came on at 6:30, the channel would go grey! Its like it lost sync or authorization or something like that. Right at 6:30 when we went from local news to CBS network news. Doesn't seem like a week signal issue or anything like that, right? Picture is typically nice and clear, and we only have 2 connections in the house - one for that TV, the other for Internet.

Do you think they have copy protection turned on for that show or something?

I do have a service call in for a truck roll this evening, for someone to come and check it out, but if the tech doesn't see the channel drop at 6:30PM - well, it does sound crazy ... Hopefully the tech'll bring replacement cards and a CISCO box ...

I want to record the Olympics opening ceremonies tonight, and Breaking bad every Sunday night!

I'm assuming this is a local station, which by law should not be copy protected. While the "gray" screen recording is in progress, go to DVR Diagnostics and look at the info for that channel. What is the CCI Byte value? Is should be 0x00. If it's copy protected it will be non-zero.

However, even a copy protected channel should still record on your tivo!

I'm not sure what a CISCO SD adapter is. Did you mean Tuning Adapter (TA)?

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Well, there's unintentional and then there's unintentional, and we are talking about a cable company who makes more when you rent their equipment than if you use a TiVo.

The statement is true, but misleading. CATV companies typically make very little, if anything, off STB and DVR rentals. Often they lose money. Where they make money, howver, is selling additional services on those platforms. Paradoxically, they could make just as much money, or even more, by supporting those services on platforms like TiVo, but in order to do so they would have to give up the control over their subs they find so very dear. Hard to believe as it may be, their paranoia is even greater than their greed.

I live in Boulder and got a TiVo Premiere in April. I started having problems with intermittent channels. I determined after multiple calls with TiVo and Comcast that I have Switched Digital Video (SDV) from Comcast and that is causing the issue.

TiVo says all I need is a Digital Tuning Adapter. Comcast keeps trying to give me a digital to analog converter. I've spent hours on this issue.

Question: Does anyone in this area have the same problem? Have you been able to get it fixed? Does Comcast provide a solution in the area? (Note that my CableCard is working and I get most channels most of the time).

We are moving to Vero Beach next year. Does any one know if Comcast in Vero uses SDV? I believe they are on Cisco products. The above post suggests that Comcast doesnt use SDV anywhere... that would be great if true.

We are moving to Vero Beach next year. Does any one know if Comcast in Vero uses SDV? I believe they are on Cisco products. The above post suggests that Comcast doesnt use SDV anywhere... that would be great if true.

Not so great, really. I finally got tired of TWC's customer service and told them to stick it. I jumped ship and ordered service with Grande Cable TV. The reduced pricing is nice, and their customer service leaves TWC in the dust, but I surely do miss SDV. There are at least 40 HD channels on TWC I recorded on a regular basis, and they are all missing on Grande, because they have not deployed SDV.

Not so great, really. I finally got tired of TWC's customer service and told them to stick it. I jumped ship and ordered service with Grande Cable TV. The reduced pricing is nice, and their customer service leaves TWC in the dust, but I surely do miss SDV. There are at least 40 HD channels on TWC I recorded on a regular basis, and they are all missing on Grande, because they have not deployed SDV.

Well, thats true. It could be a double edged sword. I should go look at Comcast's lineup and compare it with what I have now with TWC.

Well, thats true. It could be a double edged sword. I should go look at Comcast's lineup and compare it with what I have now with TWC.

The only TWC I have to compare with is NYC since my brother there has TWC. He has more channels, but many of them are extremely niche. So much that I've never heard of them.

Anyway the following thread at AVS forum has a chart of all the HD channels carried by the various major providers. Note though, that Comcast doesn't offer all the HD channels they carry in all markets, but they have been getting quicker at rolling channels out.

The only TWC I have to compare with is NYC since my brother there has TWC. He has more channels, but many of them are extremely niche. So much that I've never heard of them.

Anyway the following thread at AVS forum has a chart of all the HD channels carried by the various major providers. Note though, that Comcast doesn't offer all the HD channels they carry in all markets, but they have been getting quicker at rolling channels out.

Yup. I compared my lineup here on TWC with what Comcast Vero has and they are very comparable. The only missing channel that I care about is Smithsonian. I did notice that C&I is only available in the 'Premier' tier while I will likely only go for the 'Preferred' tier.

This past week I got a letter in the mail stating that cox will be rolling out SDV on November 7th in in my area. And that I can call to request a tuning adapter to be mailed to me or for pick up at a cox retail location.

So I call, and get an automatic phone system asking me how may I help you. so I ask: "I would like to request a turning adapter" and it responds with "It sounds like the clock on your cable box is incorrect, is that correct?"

I hit zero a bunch of times and finally I get a person. Who then transfers me to tech support, who then transfers me to sales, who then transfers me back to tech, then I got transferred back to sales. who then transferred me back to tech. So finally I get a guy who knows about tuning adapters, but he tells me I have to talk to sales, they tech can't mail them out or have them available for pick up, so he finally gets me someone.

Talking to this person, I get placed on hold for a couple minutes, then he comes back with we have a promotion, if I swap out my cable cards for a cable box they will only charge me $1.99 a month for the cable box. I tell him no chance, I want to keep my tivo. I get placed on hold for 5 minutes, then he comes back with they will have a truck roll between 10:30 and 12:30 tomorrow with a $50 truck roll fee and wanted to know if I was going to be available / home.

I argued that the letter states that I can have one mailed to me or can pick one up. He had me hold again while he looked into how to do self installs. It took them 15 minutes to figure out how and get one UPS'ed to me.

I was on the phone for 55 minutes and 35 seconds to get a turning adapter...

Does tivo have any email address to report how difficult it is to get one of these from the cable companies?

I know this is old but I had a similar issue when Charter first rolled out TA's in my area. The internal communication for charter was terrible. No one even knew about the letter that was sent out to notify the subscribers. Now that it has been a couple of years, its not a problem. I imagine until SDV is common this will be an issue in all areas as it is being rolled out. Just need to be persistent and patient.

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I am using a tivoHD with Charter in Pasadena, CA. I realize this is an old thread but the topic is still relevant. My current nightmare has been going on for about a year. Ever since they switched the local network to all digital, my Cisco STA1520 tuning adapter looses sync every 4-6 weeks and I cannot access any of the SDV channels. After numerous tech visits, equipment swaps, and over the phone refreshes I finally got a tech to admit that there is a known problem with the tuning adapter. It needs to reauthorize with the headend (not sure if this is the proper terminology) every month and the bug with the system prevents it from doing this, thus the need to manually have a hit signal sent each time. There is apparently a firmware fix from CISCO in the works. I reached out to TIVO and they admitted they knew about the issue but didnt know when a fix would be available. They offered to cancel my service if that is what I wanted. Obviously this is incredibly frustrating. I wanted to reach out to see if this is still happening to other people and and if anyone had any current reliable information on the status of a possible fix. Does this issue effect ALL tivos (including the Romios)? You would think that TIVO would be working around the clock to solve the issue? Charters answer was that I need to ditch the TIVO and switch to their offerings.

I had similar problems years ago when the TAs were first rolled out. Then I had no problems for a very long time. After my underground cable was cut by accident and repaired I started to have random failures to reauthorize. I don't know if it was a coincidence or the reauthorize is a weak signal. When I have trouble I directly call the national number (866-606-5889). They quickly reauthorize and showed me where to check for the expiration setting.
under remote&device settings/tuning adapter/tuning adapter diagnostics.
Go down to PowerKEY information, hit nextpage twice and check "Sub Expires".
When it is reauthorized it is set to more than a month in the future. Since the hits are monthly I put a reminder in my calendar to check a few days before the date shown. When I check; if the hit worked then it will have changed to a new future date. I then put a new reminder in my calendar. So far so good. If not then I will call the number.
I have had failures to get channels and had to reboot two of my Tivos when a show is not recorded due to "no video signal". Not always a SDV channel. I wonder if a Tivo update or TA or cable card update caused a new problem.